What’s Behind Israeli Allegations of Hezbollah Storing Weapons in Residential Areas?

On the opposite side, Hezbollah rockets kept pounding deep into the occupied territories, with Israeli media outlets saying that emergency state is announced across Israel.

But in the middle of the unknown situation of this conflict in the coming days, Yoav Gallant, the regime's defense minister, has announced the beginning of the third phase of military operations in Lebanon and at the same time said that the Israeli army announced its intention to carry out large-scale attacks on southern Lebanon and sent a text message to the residents of this area, asking them to evacuate their homes.

In this text message, it is claimed that residential units have become a place for the storage of Hezbollah's arms. 

"If you are in a building where there are Hezbollah weapons, leave until further notice," the text read. 

The Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari, too, alleged that Hezbollah stores missiles and ammunition in the civilians' buildings. 

Repeating this claim while the Israelis have widely targeted civilian places such as health centers, infrastructures, urban houses and villages in Monday's attacks can be a sign of the Tel Aviv regime's plan to develop its crimes against civilians in days, weeks, and maybe months to come. 

Why is the Israeli claim fundamentally false? 

The Israeli army is claiming that Hezbollah has converted the residential areas into weapons storage in Lebanon while there are very clear and evident reasons to reject this allegation. 

The most important evidence of the falsehood of the Israeli army officials' statements about the location of resistance missiles in Lebanon are the advanced and fully professional infrastructures that Hezbollah, as a powerful and modern army, including in the field of building weapons depots, complex and scientific methods of maintaining the security of these depots, is using for fast preparation of the weapons for launching. One of the recent examples of Hezbollah’s military infrastructure is the underground "missile cities" that are built so long and equipped that their showing on media, especially the missile launchers moving inside them, made a splash on media regionally and internationally, something showing off the considerable and unpredictable advances of Hezbollah, and this was just one of the surprises of Hezbollah among many unshown ones. 

Naturally, when Hezbollah has the capability to build such large and well-equipped missile infrastructure near the borders of the occupied territories and under the spying eyes of the Israelis and the Americans and their regional allies, the claim of using citizens' homes as missile depots is highly ridiculous and threadbare. 

Another important point in this regard is the wider geography of Lebanon compared to Gaza and the very different situation of Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. In their wars with the Gaza resistance groups, the Israelis have always alleged Hamas using civilian areas to fire rockets at occupied settlements in order to cover up and justify their heinous crimes against civilians. 

Although over and over after Hamas attack on October 7, the falsehood of the Israeli allegations for massacring the women and children were disclosed, the nature of partisan wars of the resistance forces in Gaza which is under siege and is a small area, are never similar to the vast area of Lebanon, especially that this country has 375-km common borders with Syria as another branch of the Axis of Resistance. 

Also, Hezbollah, like Hamas, has built a very complex and wide and long network of tunnels during the past decades, which extends along the entire 75-km border of Lebanon with the north of the occupied territories, and the Israeli army knows very well that these tunnels constitute an important part of the combat-operational power of the Hezbollah forces and the the movement does not easily expose its weapons warehouses to the regime's airstrikes.

Therefore, it is largely ridiculous to claim that Hezbollah stores its weapons in civilian buildings in the cities and villages. 

Repeating Gaza destruction strategy in Lebanon

As Israeli claims turn to be false, now the question is why is the Israeli regime making such allegations, and what are its plans behind them? 

Looking at the trend of war over the past 11 months makes it clear that the Israeli leaders, on the strength of staunch support from the US and Europe, have resorted to the dirtiest methods of destruction of houses, farms, infrastructure, and health centers to escape the destructive consequences of defeat against Hamas, to an extent that data suggest that 70 percent of Gaza was totally destroyed. 

Given this reality, the Israeli leaders in full coordination with the US are preparing themselves for repeating such scenario this time in Lebanon, or at least its south. There are some reasons to this strategy: 

Firstly, All 10 divisions of the Israeli army (including 10 active brigades and 21 reserve brigades) have been fully active on Gaza front during the past 11 months, and the exhaustion of the forces and the lack of reserve forces, as the main backbone of the army, do not allow for long-time ground battle with Lebanon. That is why the Israeli army had to send the 98TH Paratrooper Division , which was supposed to continue operations in Gaza, to the northern borders to join the 36TH Division. 

Indeed, Hezbollah's capabilities in a all-out ground war are not fully known even to Israeli strategists and involvement into a ground battle with Hezbollah would never be comparable to Gaza. In other words, repeating the scenario of occupying Gaza in southern Lebanon is practically impossible for the exhausted and depleted Israeli army and while Israel it hit by political and social crisis, and the most reliable and available choice for the Israeli army is use of massive air operations. 

Additionally, the repeated bombings of residential areas in southern Lebanon during the past 11 months show that the regime's database about the location of Hezbollah's missile depots and other military infrastructure is poor, and the Israeli leaders are incapable of weakening Hezbollah's military power with airstrikes. That is why they have defined the bombing of residential areas as a military aim in their war against Lebanon. 

This is while during the past months, Hezbollah has unveiled its extensive and detailed military target bank many times during the past months by displaying the images obtained from military sites, economic infrastructures and strategic facilities of Israel using surveillance drones, proving that it can penetrate Israeli air defenses, especially Irone Dome, and strike these targets. 

So, the Israeli allegations about location of Hezbollah missile warehouses can serve an aim to create an equation of terror by destruction of cities and villages, setting up a buffer zone by making the Lebanese regions along the border with Israel uninhabitable, and unleashing waves of refugees to use it as a leverage against Hezbollah and strike a deal allowing the displaced Israelis to return home in northern border areas.